Sponsored stories heading to Facebook’s real-time ticker

Sponsored stories are starting to be included in Facebook’s real-time ticker for the first time, as part of a push to make advertising on the site more ‘relevant’. But some critics argue that the move is a step too far in terms of inserting adverts into a user’s ‘social stream’.

Facebook launched the real-time ticker earlier this year. The feature has been criticised by some, who see it as an unnecessary piece of clutter in the UI. Personally, I find it to be not only ugly, but also prone to repeating messages that I’ve already ignored once in the main ‘stream’. Adding adverts certainly won’t help.

It’s clear that Facebook is keen to get ‘social context’ advertising to be a more established part of users’ online lives. But it can be argued that they way they are doing it is not particularly subtle, with many users more than aware of the advertising being a ‘foreign object’ in their feed.